Journal ArticleDOI
Downward Comparison Principles in Social Psychology
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TLDR
In this article, it was shown that downward comparison is a process evoked by negative affect, and that there is considerable evidence for self-enhancing comparison processes, which is involved in several areas of social-psycho logical research.Abstract:
The literature of social psychology contains a number of phenomena that appear to be paradoxical. For example, persons who face a threatening experience prefer to affiliate with threatened others rather than with nonthreatened others (Schachter, 1959), and persons in groups in which reward is equally distributed are less satisfied compared with persons in groups that include one particularly unfortunate member (Brickman, 1975). The purpose of this article is to show that these phenomena are best construed as social comparison processes and that various phenomena derive from one basic process termed downward comparison; the essence of this process is that persons can enhance their own subjective well-being by comparing themselves with a less fortunate other. In this article I show that downward comparison is a process evoked by negative affect, that there is considerable evidence for self-enhancing comparison processes, and that downward comparison effects are involved in several areas of social-psycho logical research.read more
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References
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Journal ArticleDOI
A Theory of Social Comparison Processes
TL;DR: In this article, the authors pointed out that there is a strong functional tie between opinions and abilities in humans and that the ability evaluation of an individual can be expressed as a comparison of the performance of a particular ability with other abilities.
Journal ArticleDOI
In-group bias in the minimal intergroup situation: A cognitive-motivational analysis.
TL;DR: In this paper, a review of the research on intergroup discrimination in favor of one's own group is reviewed in terms of the basis of differentiati on between in-group and out-group, and the response measure on which ingroup bias is assessed.
Journal ArticleDOI
The “false consensus effect”: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes
TL;DR: This paper found that social observers tend to perceive a "false consensus" with respect to the relative commonness of their own responses, and a related bias was found to exist in the observers' social inferences.